Personalize Recommendations for Anonymous Users using SessionId

Question

For the User-Personalization recipe:

According to this documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/personalize/latest/dg/recording-events.html#recording-anonymous-user-events:~:text=You%20can%20record%20events%20for%20users%20before%20they%20create%20an%20account.%20This%20allows%20you%20to%20get%20recommendations%20for%20anonymous%20users.%20You%20can%20provide%20the%20sessionId%20as%20the%20userID%20in%20your%20GetRecommendations%20request.

It seems like we should be able to query the Personalize engine for a `session_id` if it has interactions and does not have a `user_id`. However, when trying this and querying with a `session_id`, it still returns the high popularity items instead of relevant item recommendations.

Is this incorrect, or will it only return relevant items after the user creates an account (e.g. has a `user_id` in the Users dataset)?

Thanks in advance

Answer

If you call the PutEvents API without a userId to send in new interactions for an anonymous user, you can call the GetRecommendations API after 1-2 seconds with the sessionId as the userId to retrieve recommendations that are personalized to the session. Of course, the sessionId from the PutEvents call needs to be the same value in the GetRecommendations API call.

If your PutEvents call(s) have a sessionId and userId specified, you must use the userId as the userId in the GetRecommendations call.

Personalize Recommendations for Anonymous Users using SessionId

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